grassland and white-topped mountains beyond and clouds roiling titanic in the grey sky, and I felt a sudden overwhelming compulsion to go. There was more to the world than the village of Gara, and I suddenly wanted very much to go look at it. There was nothing really keeping me, and the father of my little playmate would probably be lying in wait for me – with cudgel – every time I turned around. I made up my mind at that point.
I visited the village one last time – shortly after midnight. I certainly didn’t intend to leave empty-handed. A storage shed provided me with as much food as I could conveniently carry, and, since it’s not prudent to travel unarmed, I also took a fairly large knife. I’d fashioned a sling a year or so previously, and the tedious hours spent watching over other people’s cows had given me plenty of time for practice. I wonder whatever happened to that sling.
I looked around the shed and decided that I had everything I really needed, and so I crept quietly down that dusty street, waded across the river again, and went from that place forever.
When I think back on it, I realize that I owe that heavy-handed villager an enormous debt of gratitude. Had he not come into that barn when he did, I might never have climbed that hill on such a day to gaze to the west, and I might very well have lived out my life in Gara and died there. Isn’t it odd how the little things can change a man’s entire life?
The lands of the Tolnedrans lay to the west, and by morning I was well within their borders. I had no real destination in mind, just that odd compulsion to travel westward. I passed a few villages, but saw no real reason to stop.
It was two – or perhaps three – days after I left Gara when I encountered a humorous, good-natured old fellow driving a rickety cart. ‘Where be ye bound, boy?’ he asked me in what seemed to me at the time to be an outlandish dialect.
‘Oh,’ I replied with a vague gesture toward the west, ‘that way, I guess.’
‘You don’t seem very certain.’
I grinned at him. ‘I’m not,’ I admitted. ‘It’s just that I’ve got a powerful urge to see what’s on the other side of the next hill.’
He evidently took me quite literally. At the time I thought he was a Tolnedran, and I’ve noticed that they’re all very literal-minded. ‘Not much on the other side of that hill up ahead but Tol Malin,’ he told me.
‘Tol Malin?’
‘It’s a fair-sized town. The people who live there have a puffed-up opinion of themselves. Anybody else wouldn’t have bothered with that “Tol”, but they seem to think it makes the place sound important. I’m going that way myself, and if you’re of a mind, you can ride along. Hop up, boy. It’s a long way to walk.’
I thought at the time that all Tolnedrans spoke the way he did, but I soon found out that I was wrong. I tarried for a couple of weeks in Tol Malin, and it was there that I first encountered the concept of money. Trust the Tolnedrans to invent money. I found the whole idea fascinating. Here was something small enough to be portable and yet of enormous value. Someone who’s just stolen a chair or a table or a horse is fairly conspicuous. Money, on the other hand, can’t be identified as someone else’s property once it’s in your pocket.
Unfortunately, Tolnedrans are very possessive about their money, and it was in Tol Malin that I first heard someone shout, ‘Stop, thief!’ I left town rather quickly at that point.
I hope you realize that I wouldn’t be making such an issue of some of my boyhood habits except for the fact that my daughter can be very tiresome about my occasional relapses. I’d just like for people to see my side of it for a change. Given my circumstances, did I really have any choice?
Oddly enough, I encountered that same humorous old fellow again about five miles outside Tol Malin. ‘Well, boy,’ he greeted me. ‘I see that you’re still moving along westward.’
‘There was a little misunderstanding back in Tol Malin,’ I replied defensively. ‘I thought it might be best for me to leave.’
He laughed knowingly, and for some reason his laughter made my whole day seem brighter. He was a very ordinary-looking old fellow with white hair and beard, but his deep blue eyes seemed strangely out of place in his wrinkled face. They were very wise, but they didn’t seem to be the eyes of an old man. They also seemed to see right through all my excuses and lame explanations. ‘Well, hop up again, boy,’ he told me. ‘We still both seem to be going in the same direction.’
We traveled across the lands of the Tolnedrans for the next several weeks, moving steadily westward. This was before those people developed their obsession with straight, well-maintained roads, and what we followed were little more than wagon tracks that meandered along the course of least resistance across the meadows.
Like just about everybody else in the world in those days, the Tolnedrans were farmers. There were very few isolated farmsteads out in the countryside, because for the most part the people lived in villages, went out to work their fields each morning, and returned to the villages each night.
We passed one of those villages one morning about the middle of summer, and I saw those farmers trudging out to work. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier if they’d just build their houses out where their fields are?’ I asked the old man.
‘Probably so,’ he agreed, ‘but then they’d be peasants instead of townsmen. A Tolnedran would sooner die than have others think of him as a peasant.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ I objected. ‘They spend all day every day grubbing in the dirt, and that means that they are peasants, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ he replied calmly, ‘but they seem to think that if they live in a village, that makes them townsmen.’
‘Is that so important to them?’
‘Very important, boy. A Tolnedran always wants to keep a good opinion of himself.’
‘I think it’s stupid, myself.’
‘Many of the things people do are stupid. Keep your eyes and ears open the next time we go through one of these villages. If you pay attention, you’ll see what I’m talking about.’
I probably wouldn’t even have noticed if he hadn’t pointed it out. We passed through several of those villages during the next couple of weeks, and I got to know the Tolnedrans. I didn’t care too much for them, but I got to know them. A Tolnedran spends just about every waking minute trying to determine his exact rank in his community, and the higher he perceives his rank to be, the more offensive he becomes. He treats his servant badly – not out of cruelty, but out of a deep-seated need to establish his superiority. He’ll spend hours in front of a mirror practicing a haughty, superior expression. Maybe that’s what set my teeth on edge. I don’t like having people look down their noses at me, and my status as a vagabond put me at the very bottom of the social ladder, so everybody looked down his nose at me.
‘The next pompous ass who sneers at me is going to get a punch in the mouth,’ I muttered darkly as we left one village as summer was winding down.
The old man shrugged. ‘Why bother?’
‘I don’t care for people who treat me like dirt.’
‘Do you really care what they think?’
‘Not in the slightest.’
‘Why
